Neloth Adus

Character Name: Neloth Adus

Nickname(s): Nel

Race: Dunmer

Sex: Male

Age: 246

Birthplace: Balmora, Vvardenfell, Morrowind

Height: 6'1

Weight: 162lb

Eye Color:  Red Iris and Red White Of The Eye

Hair Color: Black

Hair Style:  Long and Natural

Facial Hair: Thick Goatee and Long Knot Beard

Skin Color: Ashen-blue

Build: Neloth is athletic and toned in terms of muscles to his hard-labour in prison, but his body's still rather gaunt due to his previous skooma addictions and so what he lacks in strength he makes up for with dexterity.

Distinguishing Features:  Neloth's body is a rather morbid painting; scars adorn his torso, arms and legs, a cryptic diagram detailing his experiences. As well as this, he appears wrinkled and more aged than he really is due to his on-and-off skooma addictions, but every wrinkle and indent makes him seem all the wiser, yet world-weary too.



Profession: Assassin-for-hire/All-around mercenary (formerly), Mythic Dawn Cultist (formerly), Author and Wanderer (currently)

Skills: Speechcraft, Hand-to-hand, Long Blades, Alchemy

Magic: Neloth is an adept conjuration mage, though he only utilised this to summon bound weaponry and armour in the past.

Training: Neloth has never be trained in much, aside from basic combat training by his uncle. During his time in the Mythic Dawn, he was taught how to compose several alchemical compounds (healing potions and poisons) and poisons, as well as how to utilise bound armour and weaponry.

Other Abilities: Aside from being quick-witted, he doesn't have any special abilities.

Apparel: Neloth sports generic working-class clothing; a faded white cloth shit, leather braces, brown cloth pants and leather boots.

Weaponry: Neloth is in possession of a silver longsword, but keeps an old Daedric dagger on his person occasionally.

Other Equipment: Neloth rarely carries much other than a bag of septims.

Companions: None.



Affiliation: Neloth has very few allies, aside from his remaining family in Balmora and the Imperial Legion due to him aiding them in their narcotics crackdown.

Religious Belief: Worships all manner of Daedra, but mainly Azura.

Sexual Preference: Heterosexual

Relationship Status: Single.

Personality: Neloth is a rather pragmatic man, but that's not to say he's officious or stiff in anyway; in fact, he's rather lenient and sociable. There's little which escapes his keen eyes, and his perception is matched equally by his cunning and wit. While he can appear world-weary, cynical or just plain blunt, this is a front; he's an emotionally sensitive man with a troubling past; one he is not proud of. Morally, he feels he can't define himself; he's killed whole groups of people in exchange for skooma, but has also given money to charities and aided the Legion is keeping down crime. Neloth is trusting and loyal, but these traits often end up with him getting burned.



Neloth Adus was born in Balmora as an ordinary, working-class citizen. His father a struggling merchant, and his mother a housewife looking after her children, his life was ordinary, yet everything but; Balmora was rife with crime and deviance of all sorts, especially with the moon sugar gangs moving in fast. Throughout his childhood, he was exposed to a variety of malcontents through his father's illicit-but-not-illegal business connections and the local children, many of whom were the child of a criminal or knew of them, revering them as folk heroes of sorts. This never skewed his view on life, but during his youth he resented the Empire's influence in Morrowind due to the common hatred of them, and even sharing his father's racism towards Argonians.

During the corprus outbreak, his father contracted a severe case of the disease and was sectioned in the corprusarium, left to rot out of the public eye. This phased Neloth greatly due to his father's importance in his life, but he was reluctant to attempt to visit him due to his condition and perhaps because he felt this was what he deserved... at least from some of the incidents he'd noted in his adolescence towards his mother. As a result of his "absence", Neloth was placed in charge of the family business, which dealt in magic scrolls obtained from merchants outside Morrowind and sold for much more than they were worth. The grief he felt, the turmoil of living in the seedy town and the onset of depression caused by his apathetic lack of direction or purpose in life made certain those funds would be misappropriated and mismanaged; they all went towards large amounts of skooma, which Neloth smoked day in day out to block out his suffering. This caused him to build up debts when he had no money left to buy more, and the only way he could fulfill them was to perform sexual acts for the perverted dealers or for the more business-oriented ones he'd have to kill.

Neloth knew how to fight, and was taught by his father on how to use a sword, but he wasn't sure if he could bring himself to kill people, even for more skooma. The dealer's offered his a compromise; in exchange for the deaths of rival smugglers, dealers or just any person that irritated them, he'd receive a dose of Hist beforehand and a few hits of skooma after. Neloth had heard tales of Hist and what it did, but he supposed if it allowed him to kill without feeling guilty, so be it. His first few were located in a skooma production hut outside of the town, and Nel spared no time in downing the liquid. The next hour was a blur; psychedelic like the northern lights of Skyrim and as bloody as it's Nord inhabitants. What came after, however, was clear as day; blood stricken all over his body, his weapon and the entire landscape. So much blood... and the bodies could barely be identified as human. Could Neloth even identify himself as human after doing this?

The withdrawal persuaded him that he could, and within the hour he was high as a cliff racer again. This cycle repeated itself more times than Neloth would like to remember, or even could remember. His salvation, if you could call it that, came in the form of a pastime he had taken up while high; reading. It required little movement and minimal focus, as long as you could kept your head up without nodding off. The skooma den he was in seemed to be owned by someone very much into all aspects of the Daedra, with myriads of books on them. Many of these sparks his interest, but none as much as the Mythic Dawn Commentaries. It seemed they were just gathering dust on a shelf that was scarcely touched until he opened their accused pages and perused them...

In spite of the chains of his addiction, in his deranged state of mind he believed this would be his purpose; he could leave this rotten drug behind him and have a meaning. To break the chains of his addiction, he tied himself to a tree far outside the town while he was high, tossing the key just out of reach; a halo in reverse. Over the next forty-eight hours, his world began to fall apart and it's fragile walls came tumbling in; perhaps he deserved this, but in the end it would be worthwhile. After these days were passed, he shouted as loudly as possible to attract the attention of townsfolk, getting one of the less evil men of the town to unshackle him. The addiction lingered, but he fought it. Nel sought sustenance and immediately fled, taking the books with him as he slipped out of Vvardenfell via a smuggling boat and then cut through the mainland as he fought to illegally get into Cyrodil.

After about a week or so, he'd reached the Imperial continent and spared no time going where the cryptic writings seemed to indicate; the sewers beneath the city. It was here that he was tested on his faith to Dagon and destruction itself, and he narrowly became a part of the cult; a novitiate. When he arrived at Lake Arrius' caverns, the Mythic Dawn were still a secretive clandestine organisation that had not even made a scratch on the surface of Tamriel's history. Neloth was given the red robes and a dagger of Daedric origin, tasked with sacrificing a captive to Dagon to prove his worth. Safe in the knowledge these people were the future, he did as he was told and slit the poor man's throat, taking the virginity of the dagger. The tasks he was given were of a dark and morally grey nature, secretly killing certain important members of the Imperial nobility or members of the church or having to spy on certain people; acting as a sleeper agent. The work he performed for his Lord did not go unnoticed, and the respect he gained allowed him to command a cult following within the Mythic Dawn (ironically) who saw him as a viable lieutenant.

The power flowed to his head as well as illicitly obtained moon sugar the cultists had no idea was taking, and for a brief while he could be considered insane; he spoke for hours on end to his small group of followers of what Dagon would do, fabricating atrocities committed by the Divines and preaching Dagon's revolutionary power. In hindsight, everything he was saying was totally ridiculous and made no sense at all, but there was something about the way he spoke which gave his meaningless babble some shroud of intelligence. With little sleep and even less to eat, he began to lose it completely. He spoke how he was Dagon in the flesh, the channeling of Dagon's power on Nirn, the Dagonine. Even amongst a group of lunatics, he appeared mad. Due to his unwavering belief in their Lord and the wheels he set in motion for the Dawn's plan to be push forward, they could do nothing.

Around the time of the Emperor's demise and the Hero of Kvatch's infiltration into their organisation, Neloth was experiencing vivid hallucinations due to his lack of sleep and constant moon sugar usage. Reality seemed to split into photographic frames and pictures as the cultists celebrated their victories, and in his drug-fueled madness Neloth slew about five of his underlings before sprinting from the caverns and tearing off his robes, laughing as though he'd been touched by Sheogorath. The rest seemed to fade as he awoke in the wilderness, donning torn sack cloth pants and holding a bloody Daedric dagger, a fox licking the blood from an arrow wound on his hip. In primal rage, he tore open the curious fox and began to devour it's innards, his hunger growing like a tumour. Over the next few hours, he hunted like a wolf and ate a variety of uncooked animal flesh and plants, falling into a slumber on the banks of a river. It felt like he slept for days, weeks even, but after he awoke his sanity was clearer. Some amnesia from his poor mental state was to be expected, but after a few days the memories flooded back...

Now, he really did feel like Dagon; evil, self-loathing and suicidal. The deaths he was responsible for, the suffering he had caused... by Azura, what had he done? As he looked into the river, a terrifying stranger seemed to look back at him; frail, filthy and deranged. The townsfolk of Cyrodil spoke of the Blades' victory over the Mythic Dawn, and the recent Battle of Bruma that occured the day before. Had he really slept for weeks, or had he just been too dissociated to remember? Neloth had to go home. Drifting in an ocean of fractured images, he arrived back in Balmora within a week and sought the help of his family. However, he returned only to find that his siblings had all died and his mother was crippled... and how had this happened? The local skooma kingpin had come looking to settle some debts, and there were collateral damages incurred; casualties. His mother scorned him, but he was understanding of why.

With little choice left, he confronted his dealer and was roughed up a little by his henchmen. The dealer decided that in order to settle his debt he would have to kill more rivals. Neloth accepted, but had no intention of following these orders through. After being given the Hist, he downed the bottle immediately. The room became a kaleidoscope of death, and Neloth awoke once more in a room full of the dead, being close to it himself. Unfortunately for him, the Imperial guards had been watching the building for a while now and came in shortly after he collapsed due to tiredness. His was the only warm body in the hovel, and he awoke on a stone table in an Imperial guardhouse, his injuries having been tended to and his feet and hands restrained.

A man almost as gaunt as him approached the table, and began asking for his cooperation in return for a lesser sentence. In his confusion, he had little idea what the man was talking about, but agreed. As his mind cleared up, the panic kicked in; he was to serve sixty years in an Imperial jail unless he cooperated in which case it would be lowered to forty-five years. With no choice, he regretfully gave a detailed account of the dealers he knew of in the area, how they operated and how they were smuggling it into Morrowind. It took a few weeks for his information to be validated, but it lead to the arrest of a myriad of skooma kingpins from Balmora to Ebonheart. At this point, he thanked Azura for his former dealer's loose lips.

Prison was still on his horizon, and the future looked nothing if bleak. Neloth was given a rather quick trial and the Legion attempted to negotiate to extradite him to Cyrodil, but the Houses of Morrowind wanted him to experience a much worse sentence in a prison on the mainland. The Legion reluctantly agreed. Nel didn't fear the time in prison, nor the hard labour; he feared bumping into someone he'd help put away. His days were now spent mining ebony ore in a dingy underground mine with barely enough light to see your own pickaxe. For protection, he associated himself with one of the racist dunmer gangs in the prison, but he despised their anti-Argonian propaganda. Occasionally he had to fight for them, but in his deep depression he cared not. Most of his time became devoted to writing, with the aid of smuggled-in liquid skooma. Feeling guilty about the Mythic Dawn, about his family and about his addiction, he thought it would be... therapeutic to write about them all in an autobiographical sense. It helped the time pass, seeing as the clanking of his pickaxe and the bloodying of his fists didn't seem to do the trick.

Upon his release, he sought a publisher for his book in Mournhold and titled it "Balmora Blues", a pun on the potent strain of skooma from his hometown. It satirised both his skooma addiction, the skooma culture, the Mythic Dawn and all of his shortcomings in life up until his release from prison, though it had a deep apologetic tone to it's words and was meant to be comical yet tragic. The work was published anonymously to avoid arousing suspicion from the Vigilants of Stendarr, anti-Daedra groups or any other white knight looking for a target. The book was a success and he earned a sizable amount of septims from it's sales, though apparently many copies were being bought by the Vigilants to burn. They even came to the town of Balmora to hunt for Nel, but he was long gone; he had gone back to Cyrodil and bought a home in Cheydinhal, a town he would reside in for many years to come.

Getting comfortable and settling down was a pipe dream, however. The Imperial Legion constantly began to rely on his experience in the hope of catching skooma dealers across the Empire's territories as their grasp grew ever weaker, and the pressure to comply with their requests was overwhelming. Eventually they left him alone, but this just left a void that would soon be filled. The Thieves Guild had used their corrupt Imperial connections to source the writer of "Balmora Blues", and had come up with Neloth's name and address. In the night one day, they crept in through his open window and told him not to be alarmed. They were willing to cut him in on the cut of a heist if he helped them out. Their faces were masked and voices muffled, and he was unsure whether to trust them, but the amount of money they were offering was... tempting. They were planning to rob a skooma kingpin operating in the Vvardenfell area, but due to the amount of protection the man had there was no way they could get in without getting killed or at the very least spotted. They needed Neloth to reveal the location of this den to his Legion connections so the skooma would be confiscated and held in their outpost in Ebonheart where the guild would use their connections to remove it and sell it. It was a simple task, but his word was trusted amongst the Legion due to his past cooperation and knowledge of the skooma trade.

Nel did as instructed, and within the month fifty-thousand septims appeared in a chest in his living room one morning. It was quickly hidden below the house; a fail-safe for if he ever became broke. The guild have not yet contacted him again, although he continues to cooperate with the Legion's anti-narcotics crackdowns. All manner of people could knock on his door now; The Legion's men, Hired assassins working for disgruntled skooma dealers who had discovered his identity, the Thieves Guild looking for more illicit aid or the Vigilants of Stendarr. Neloth lives quietly in Cheydinhal, desperately trying not to think of the danger he is constantly in.